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> Pantone 448 C, also known as the "The ugliest colour in the world", is a colour in the Pantone colour system. Described as a "drab dark brown" Things leading
by qwerty456127 7y ago
> Pantone 448 C, also known as the "The ugliest colour in the world", is a colour in the Pantone colour system. Described as a "drab dark brown"
Things leading the ratings of the ugliest things are rarely ugly. This applies to architecture and it seems to be the same with colors.
Dark brown is not the ugliest color, the ugliest color is magenta. It is commonly used as a transparency placeholder for a reason - nobody wants to actually see it. Just imagine a website with #4A412A background - it's ok, people will read it if you put something interesting there as soon as you use a reasonable color for the font. Now imagine a website with #FF00FF background - it's a disaster, everybody is going to close it immediately as soon as they accidentally navigate to it, no matter what font color you use.
- Waterluvian 7y agoIt's all context specific. I would eat magenta cotton candy.
- olivermarks 7y agoI saw it at Burning Man
- reaperducer 7y agoIt is commonly used as a transparency placeholder for a reason - nobody wants to actually see it. My memory from my days in television was that magenta was used to represent transparency because it was the opposite of chroma green, and was easy to generate electronically. That's why it ended up being in one of the palettes for the primitive-by-today's-standards CGA adapter in the early IBM PC's. Chroma green, magenta, and superblack were three "magic colors" that made TV production work in the pre-digital age. Sadly, there is no wikipedia entry for superblack even though everyone saw it all the time, and few understood its utility.
- ineedasername 7y agoWhat is it about magenta that makes it easy to generate electronically?
- dylan604 7y agoIn TV, the 3 primary colors are Red, Green, Blue. Magenta is a secondary color made from combining Red and Blue. That's what makes it easy. Just turn on 2 of the 3 colors you have to make it. It's not a fraction of them, it's just full on of 2 out of 3.
- ineedasername 7y agoAh, of course! One of those things that's obvious once I know the answer.
- aaronblohowiak 7y agoFun fact: there is no such thing as magenta as a frequency of light, it is a fun trick your mind does to explain both the low energy and high energy receptors activating without the middle energy receptors also activating. In terms of pigment, magenta is one of the primary colors.
- lubujackson 7y agoYes, was going to say this. Magenta isn't on a rainbow and isn't really a normal color in that sense. By the weirdness of how our eyes detect colors amd how our brain processes them, magenta is something like an error response catch-all for colors outside our eye's capabilities and from that standpoint it is quite interesting.
- mcv 7y agoOur heads are good at mixing colors, and we register those as colors too. Brown isn't on the rainbow either. The most interesting color on the rainbow is violet. It registers in our heads as a kind of purple when objectively it's super blue. But the cones that register red in our eyes are also slightly activated with this super blue light, which makes it register as purple in our brain. I'd love to see an experiment where people are shown both true violet and purple mixed from red and blue in proportions that make it register as the exact same purple as violet does. And then check how many people see a difference between the two colors. That might finally answer the question of whether red in your head looks the same as in my head.
- hug 7y agoI'd love if you were able provide some reading on "superblack", or even just explain it yourself. I tried looking it up myself, because it sounds interesting, but of course search results are polluted with articles on vantablack. "Super black TV" and related search terms just bring up garbage about OLED TVs and such.
- p1necone 7y agoMy assumption would be that it's whatever the darkest shade of black representable is - so 0x000000 in rgb. However that can't really be read as a distinct value in an analogue signal, maybe it's some kind of "sufficiently out of range" value so as to be distinguished from legitimate colors?
- kaetemi 7y agoI remember there was some particular shade of off-black in Windows 95 that was always transparently showing any video that was playing. Don't think it's related though.
- zamalek 7y agoThat happened because 3D cards used something called "overlay". Recall that your 3D card (Voodoo or some other 3dfx) was an additional card beyond your 2D card. The card would overlay its signal on the 2D card according to 2 parameters: a rectangle and a color. I assume that videos used the same machinery, possibly in software, so that you couldn't take screenshots for copyright reasons. Or maybe it was faster for some reason, who knows (Raymond Chen might). Either way, it's probably unrelated.
- cycloptic 7y agoThe video acceleration was done the same way with overlays because of the same hardware limitations. I remember the difference was that they used chroma keying to try and fake that it knew how to work with the windowing system -- the hardware would mask the video using the chroma key color while rendering the plane. Of course if you had another window that happened to have the chroma key color for text or something, you could drag it over the video and the text would appear oddly transparent. This happened with certain drivers on Windows up to XP, and on Unix/X11 when using the old "XVideo" extension. But this is indeed tangential and not relevant to the original comment, because the chroma key color could be anything. On one particular driver I had, I remember the chroma key color was a very ugly shade of brown :)
- zamadatix 7y agoIs this not what you are talking about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_black
- tesseract 7y agoIn this context, it's not a physical color. It refers to an analog video signal with a lower brightness level than the level which was defined as corresponding to pure black.
- wizzard 7y agoThat article is about a “surface treatment” for solid objects, like Vantablack. OP is talking about screens — I believe they are referring to OLED true black.
- dylan604 7y agoI was only familiar with the term blacker-than-black in analog broadcast. Legal black was 7.5IRE, but any value below 7.5 was referred to as blacker-than-black. Older CRT TVs were very susceptible to bad(cool/interesting) things when the video signal was out of spec.
- kiwidrew 7y ago> That's why it ended up being in one of the palettes for the primitive-by-today's-standards CGA adapter in the early IBM PC's. Interesting... do you have a source for that? The hideous CGA palette is legendary, but I thought the reason for its ugly palette is a consequence of: (1) only having 16KB of video RAM, and (2) only having ~10 bits of mode-setting and colour control registers. The CGA card was built entirely from off-the-shelf discrete logic chips (plus a 6845 CRTC) and there simply wasn't room to add any extra registers. At 320x200 resolution the colour depth was limited to 2bpp, and these two bits are wired up directly to the red and green bits of the display output. The blue and intensity bits are (in graphics modes) wired up to the mode control register. Thus the four hideous palettes: the B and I bits have to be set to a fixed value for the entire screen, and only the R and G bits can vary on a pixel-by-pixel basis. (There's a bonus palette of red, cyan, and white that can be enabled by yet another mode control bit; and the background colour -- which is usually black -- can actually be set to any one of the 16 available colours.)
- toast0 7y agoI think you both agree. Magenta is easy to generate, and the CGA electronics were designed around easy to generate colors, not pretty or good looking colors.
- pickpuck 7y agoI was thinking because it is one of the inks in CMYK for printing.
- praptak 7y agoYou are probably thinking of rich black, which in CMYK is black plus some of the other three ink colours. Converted to RGB it would still be black, but in actual printing it has its uses.
- jameshart 7y agoI definitely recall hearing the term super black as distinct from rich black to refer to just a mixture of black and cyan, but I can’t find a cite for that. May have been local to a specific printer? This was in a context where avoiding using four inks was an important cost saving, so maybe it was just a two color equivalent of rich black. Of course, those two colors were also immortalized by John Cougar Mellencamp in his “little ditty ‘bout black and cyan...”
- bonzini 7y agoThe 2-bit palettes of CGA were simply colors 2/4/6 and 3/5/7 of the text mode palette, where bit 2 is red, bit 1 is green and bit 0 is blue. The fourth color (encoded as 00) was the background and could be chosen from any of the 16 text colors. (In addition there was an "undocumented" palette consisting of colors 3/4/7 plus the background color).
- lostlogin 7y agoI would be interested to see what magenta cigarette packets did too. At least brown is relatively inconspicuous. Pulling out your magenta cigarette packet isn’t going to be something everyone wants to do.
- qwerty456127 7y agoI'm curious too. The only problem is it is going to attract too much attention when people look at the shop shelves.
- batiudrami 7y agoIn Australia darts are all packed in an unmarked cupboard behind the counter anyway. No advertising, no branding.
- a3n 7y agoTIL: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dart+cigarette+australia&t=lm&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dart+cigarette+australia&t=lm&ia=w...
- hug 7y agoYeah when ya wanna nip on down to the servo at sparrow's fart for a sanga and some durries it always takes 'em yonks an' it's not just because old mate behind the counter's a bloody galah and couldn't organise a root in a brothel. Even worse in the arvo when they're flat out like a lizard drinking, can't crack the shits at the cobber though job's not a piece of piss.
- olivermarks 7y agoI suspect you may enjoy the music of the Chats
- hug 7y ago
- barbs 7y agoI love magenta, personally
- qwerty456127 7y agoGood for you: the more things you like the more opportunities you have to be happy. Would you enjoy living and working in a room painted magenta?
- a3n 7y agoI might not like that. I also would not like living and working in a room coated with minestrone soup.
- sterkekoffie 7y agoI set all of my backgrounds and accents to brown (lighter and warmer than 448 C) and magenta. Now I'm wondering if something's wrong with me.
- labster 7y agoEveryone perceives the world differently. We don’t all have the same senses. This is normal.
- etrk 7y ago> Dark brown is not the ugliest color, the ugliest color is magenta. That's just, like, your opinion. Beauty is subjective and the only way to declare something the ugliest, in some general sense, would be to get the subjective opinions of many people. This is presumably what was done in the market research for Pantone 448 C. Also, magenta stands out. That is a likely reason why it was chosen as a transparency placeholder, rather than just being "ugly."
- qwerty456127 7y agoTry offering a reasonable (big enough for people to consider and not big enough for then to agree to everything) reward for people to set #FF00FF for their computers and phones (and keep it for e.g. a month) background colors and see how many are going to agree. I can bet much more people will agree for Pantone 448 C.
- nine_k 7y agoNo color is ugly in isolation. But some combinations are going to be problematic. Each of the colors from an ugly combination, when combined with another color in a reasonable way, will look fine, though.
- gerdesj 7y agoAll colours are simply rather imprecise descriptions that relate to bands of wavelength within the electromagnetic spectrum. I don't think that considered on its own, that any band (colour) can be considered ugly compared to another. I think that other senses get involved. Funnily enough: "drab dark brown" describes the archetypal colour of shit. Now shit has its own exciting spectrum of smells and colours but most people find it unpleasant and the colour is going to obviously get involved. Now, qwerty45etc may shit magenta coloured poo. Who knows what "web dev" does to you long term 8)
- derefr 7y agoPerhaps "ugliest" here means "least attractive", in the sense of causing the most indifference, or requiring the largest counterveiling force of other attention-grabbing properties to attract someone's attention. I.e., the least marketable color. Magenta might be hideous when swatched together with most random colors that exist in the natural world, or in society; but it's certainly also attention-grabbing in a way that can be used for effect. (It's on plenty of movie posters!)
- myself248 7y agoI don't think that dark brown is bad at all, it reminds me somewhat of chocolate. I tend to agree with the "unusually unattractive" comment in these results: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ Something slightly greener than mustard-yellow is definitely worse than dark brown, IMHO.
- claudiawerner 7y ago>Dark brown is not the ugliest color, the ugliest color is magenta. I feel as though I've seen many women wearing magenta-painted nails. They probably don't think it's ugly.
- qwerty456127 7y agoThat's because everybody knows it's not safe to tell them.
- thedufer 7y agoI don't think there's very good correlation between generally ugly colors and those that make bad backgrounds. A lot of colors are good accents but would be terrible background - probably anything at 100% saturation, 100% value (in HSV space) falls into this category, including the magenta you so dislike.
- glenneroo 7y agoT-Mobile is betting on the color Magenta not being offensive, as they've recently renamed themselves world-wide literally to "Magenta", granted in the US I've heard it will take quite some time to make the transition. If you want to see magenta being used as a webpage background color, check out any of the EU websites e.g. www.magenta.de, etc.
- qwerty456127 7y agoThat's not real magenta, that's #E30074 which actually looks nice. Now take a screenshot, paste it in your favorite graphics editor, replace #E30074 with #FF00FF and you'll see.
- filleduchaos 7y agoGeneric color names aren't limited to literally one 24-bit hex code. #0000FF is pretty harsh on the eyes as well but somehow I severely doubt that you go around telling people who talk about nicer blue hues that "those aren't real blues, only #0000FF is".
- andai 7y agoMy dark mode extension generates an even uglier color for HN (#272716). #FF00FF on the other hand is used in marketing toy dolls all the time.
- userbinator 7y agoThe more... feminine among us would disagree about magenta being ugly. ;-)
- octocode 7y agoI'd argue that there's a difference in what colors appear "unappealing" between print and screen. Staring directly into a bright, magenta-colored screen would certainly be unpleasant. Printing it onto a non-emissive material like cardboard, though, would probably look quite nice.
- cmroanirgo 7y ago> everybody is going to close it immediately as soon as they accidentally navigate to it If only bots weren't color agnostic then this would be an awesome way to get rid of them!
- lhorie 7y agoNot quite #ff00ff, but T-Mobile gets pretty close to that[1] [1] https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/magenta https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/magenta
- sillysaurusx 7y agoColor is a funny thing. Everyone as an opinion on it, because almost everyone can see color. Yet almost everyone is wrong (myself being no exception!) If you were to force cigarette companies to use magenta as their marketing color, you would probably increase sales. Magenta is eye-catching. You could make the same argument about bright orange. Imagine if HN didn't exist. Which other sites use bright orange? "No one wants to see it."
- stevewilhelm 7y agoThomson Reuters Logo Color Scheme https://www.schemecolor.com/thomson-reuters.php https://www.schemecolor.com/thomson-reuters.php
- ComputerGuru 7y agoI always forget HN is orange. https://imgur.com/a/6QhIVLp https://imgur.com/a/6QhIVLp
- cm2187 7y agoCyan is also adequately offensive.
- flycaliguy 7y agoYou can’t really compare colour on a computer screen to printed colour. It’s totally different and a printed magenta would be attention grabbing imho.
- ACow_Adonis 7y agoI used to work with a lady that selected that as the solid colour background for her desktop. Even today just recalling it I'm drawn to laugh a bit in exasperation. I feel a little bit like I'm sharing a tech horror story around a camp fire. Her desktop icon arrangement was... in line with what you would expect of such a mind. But it's yet another example I can bring up against absolute statements like everyone hates magenta.
- shard 7y agoEver since I took a color photo printing class, cyan and magenta has been two of my favorite colors. Not to mention Magenta as one of my favorite characters from Rocky Horror.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoI'm going to look at it, because I like magenta.
- lwf 7y agoFor the lazy who want quick references to each: https://www.google.com/search?q=color+picker+4A412A https://www.google.com/search?q=color+picker+4A412A https://www.google.com/search?q=color+picker+FF00FF https://www.google.com/search?q=color+picker+FF00FF
- jayd16 7y agoMagenta is used because it stands out and has an easy hex code, not because its ugly.
- GuB-42 7y agoMy understanding is that they didn't really select for the ugliest color but the one that best conveys the "cigarettes are bad" message. It has to evoke things like death and sickness in addition to being unattractive. It has to literally look like shit. Magenta has none of that, it is just "ugly".
- p410n3 7y agoTelekom[1] aka t-online aggressively uses Magenta for their Branding. Their newest Internet Package is named Magenta One. At least they use #e20074 instead of #ff00ff [1] https://telekom.de https://telekom.de
- afandian 7y agoWe have fancy business cards at work. I was asked to proof mine and I said "I'm no designer, but that magenta lozenge in the middle looks really ugly". "That's the shape that's going to be punched out" came the reply.
- loco5niner 7y agoThat opinion is subjective, and Magenta is useful in other contexts.